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Success is nothing but the product of random chance, something that not even the successful can replicate. Indeed the only way to win the lottery of success, in art, business, science, love or any other endeavor, is take buy more tickets.

This seductive thesis is the premise of Frans Johansson’s “The Click Moment,” a book that seeks to both expose the role of random chance in our lives and give us tools to best exploit it. These two concepts would seem at odds: that life is random and that we can harness that randomness, but Johansson’s book ties the two ideas together cleanly.

It is indeed difficult to know a priori what will resonate in the market. Revolutionary concepts often only seem obvious in hindsight. Successful products and companies are littered with mistakes and false starts. Instagram started as a way of uploading pictures of alcoholic drinks. YouTube began its life as an online dating service. Even the most successful companies have both iPods and Newtons in their corporate closets.

Successful companies try many projects and diligently pursue projects that have no clear connection to a high payoff, argues Johansson. Projects that succeed get more resources, projects that fail are quickly terminated. The important thing is to keep trying and not to believe that you can predict what will work.

This is a thesis that has been very much in the media since the financial crisis, a sort of peon to the benefits of small projects and agile feedback loops. It’s been in “Fooled by Randomness,” “The Lean Startup” and “Little Bets,” among others. A reaction, perhaps, to the seemingly incomprehensible scale of the financial crisis and associated government bailouts. It is as though business book writers witnessed the demise of the Titanic and concluded that smart companies only build skiffs and schooners, steering well clear of massive ocean-liners.

It resonates too. These days everyone is an entrepreneur and has to be the captain of their own ship, or so it seems. Haven’t built a team and exerted your leadership? Time to start.

We laud the individual and choose to see the efforts of entire companies on the human scale of their chief executives. We envision agency when large companies succeed or fail. We imagine Steve Jobs designing, engineering, optimizing, manufacturing, delivering, marketing and selling the iPhone instead of seeing the vast and complex apparatus of Apple production.

Little bets, lean startups and any process that embraces unplanned success can’t be big. It can’t be an iPhone.

Johansson relies heavily on anecdotes to demonstrate his points, in the style of Malcolm Gladwell, but without the reliance on academic studies. And one of his marquee examples is the surprising success of fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg. Von Furstenberg famously had a “click moment” seeing Julie Nixon Eisenhower on TV wearing an outfit that combined a wrap top with a wrap skirt. Von Furstenberg saw this and said: “Blamo: wrap dress!”

Though dressmaking is by no means a casual process, Von Furstenberg was able to go from concept to production without having to integrate an ultra-fast processor with a high-definition capacitive touch screen, wi-fi, and 3G wireless. She didn’t have to get it approved by the FCC, or work with one of the country’s largest telecommunications providers to create a special offer, or establish relationships with Chinese manufacturers able to deliver several million units.

Relying on click moments works best for small endeavors, entrepreneurs and those with modest ambitions.

Johansson made his career with “The Medici Effect,” a book that suggested that organizations can harvest creativity by tossing together people with different backgrounds. His insight was outside the box thinking comes at the confluence of different experiences and different approaches to problem solving.

HR directors loved it, especially those tasked with enhancing corporate diversity. Johansson’s thesis seemed to offer support to their efforts and he himself presented a walking case study as the son of an African American/Cherokee mother and a Swedish father. He parlayed his first book into a career consulting companies on promoting creativity through diversity.

“Click Moments” opens the opportunity for Johansson to consult on how to succeed without strategy, to eschew the prognostications of data-driven decision making and harvest success through serendipity. I wonder if that was his plan.